Florence Stawell

Who was Florence Stawell?

Florence Melian Stawell was a classical scholar.

Florence Melian Stawell, youngest daughter of Sir William Foster Stawell, was born at Melbourne on 2 May 1869. She was named for the Melians, ancient Greek idealists from Melos of whom Thucydides had written, and was known as Melian.

She spent two years at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, where she was greatly influenced by the Warden, Dr Alexander Leeper, and then went to England and entered Newnham College, Cambridge, in the May term of 1889. She was placed in class 1, division 1 in the classical tripos of 1892 but did not take part II of the tripos. In 1894-5, Miss Stawell was a classical don at Newnham but had to resign on account of ill health and henceforth lived chiefly at London with occasional visits to her relations in Australia.

In 1909, she published Homer and the Iliad: an Essay to determine the Scope and Character of the Original Poem, an important and scholarly contribution to the literature of the subject. In 1911, she offered an interpretation of the Phaistos Disc as Homeric Greek, syllabic writing.